Editorial: Keeping an eye on surveillance

At the same time a federal judge last month ruled that a federal phone surveillance program was “almost Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional, President Obama’s own panel of experts recommended 46 significant changes to the way the government gathers information on Americans.

At the same time a federal judge last month ruled that a federal phone surveillance program was “almost Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional, President Obama’s own panel of experts recommended 46 significant changes to the way the government gathers information on Americans.

Those developments indicate a growing awareness of the power of these domestic spying programs, and their potential for abuse, from inside the government itself, not just civil libertarian groups.

The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies was created in August in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leak of classified information on U.S. surveillance methods.

Last month, the panel released its report, which came to the same conclusion that U.S. District Judge Richard Leon did: The National Security Agency’s massive collection of telecommunications metadata is not essential to the nation’s war on terrorism because there is no evidence that it has thwarted a single attack.

The panel proceeds to recommend ways to scale back the scope of government snooping, moving away from a general collection of data toward a more focused and short-term surveillance.

The report says Washington “should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about U.S. persons for the purpose of enabling future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.” Instead, phone records should be collected and stored by telecommunications companies or by a private consortium. The NSA and other agencies would have to obtain separate judicial orders to search those databases instead of authorizing such searches themselves. Those records would be held for just two years.

The panel also would significantly change the policy regarding national security letters, which the FBI uses to order a communications or financial company to turn over data. The government also can demand that the company not inform anyone that their records were turned over to the feds (the so-called “gag order”). Instead, the panel suggests, the government first should convince a court that the records are relevant to an authorized investigation involving “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Furthermore, gag orders would be limited to 180 days (instead of in perpetuity) and could be challenged in court.

The panel recommended that Congress create the position of public interest advocate, whose job would be to represent privacy and civil liberties interests in proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Finally, the NSA would be prohibited from weakening encryption algorithms in online commerce, which allow it to access private data via “back doors.”

These and other recommendations are but a first step toward tightening government surveillance practices, increasing transparency and protecting Americans’ privacy absent probable cause to violate it. But that won’t happen unless Congress and the president embrace the changes — which, so far, appears unlikely. Further pressure must be applied.

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A version of this editorial first appeared in the Panama City News Herald, a Halifax Media Group newspaper in Florida.